1. Anyone who has been in a tech company knows that there is internal lingo that refers to features we devs make. But it's presented as being an "Orwellian language"
2. Based on the emails he posts, the agencies give links to review based on tips they receive or their own intel and twitter then decides if it violates ToS or not (and they sometimes did not act or simply temporarily suspended). But it's presented as a "deep state"-like collusion where the agencies control if twitter act on them or not.
3. The people in the company discuss internal matters and are sometimes critical of potential decisions. But they are presented mostly stripped of context and the focus is on anonymized employees snarky comments to make it seem like decisions were arbitrary, partisan, and without any regard to logic or context.
I could go for hours listing these.
Most quote tweets are people thinking this confirms a suspected malicious intent from twitter and that they intentionally dramatically shifted the outcomes while colluding with one side.
If anything, this confirms that Twitter acted (outside of a couple isolated occurences) in a way tamer way than I ever imagined them acting while handling the issues at hand.
EDIT: Formatting
Imagine Trump is in charge of the FBI.
It is of course tied up with partisan politics, who won or lost this week from some particular story, but more transparency is good.
If the FBI had to go through the same queue as Joe Average then their requests may well end up at the head of the queue too late for action. The same goes for celebrities, advertisers and so on. All of these have different contact points. And because law enforcement contact is one step away from the company doing something that is potentially illegal their messages are given a higher priority.
And I’m not sure “unhinged” is an appropriate description. For example, while “internal lingo” may be common, isn’t it also fair to observe that much corporate internal lingo is pretty Orwellian? Similarly, as to your second point, is it unreasonable to draw an inference that Twitter is doing what some agency wants it to do, when the agency asks Twitter to do something and then Twitter does it?
The fact that you need different internal descriptors should be a red flag. All kinds of phrases get used like selective invisibility, visibility filtering, ranking, visible to self, reducing, deboosting, or disguising a gag. Each is a form of censorship, but that's a bad word since the days of Anthony Comstock so it is never used. Censors never describe themselves as censors. See the book "The Mind of the Censor",
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58150067-the-mind-of-the...
What he said, says, or will say, doesn’t matter.
Twitter is a global platform ideal for steering public sentiment, opinion, and influencing political outcomes.
I keep seeing this, and I'm confused every time I see it, because speech on a private platform isn't protected by the first amendment.
Twitter can always say no to the feds (and other governments) in re: far more onerous and demanding requests than just an agent clicking a Report button, and in fact with far more official processes you can see the stats where they actually do just that. https://transparency.twitter.com/en/reports/removal-requests...
You can imagine how this could be weaponised. For example FBI agents could be tasked to report tweets from people who hold disfavoured opinions. This interpretation is also inline with the court’s finding over Trump’s use of the block button: https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/05/trump-twitte...
Ummm… yes it is when the speech is being suppressed by the government?
That’s kinda the entire point of the 1st amendment.
The courts have ruled that the government asking a private party to censor is no different than the government censoring itself.
There is no issue with the FBI investigating crimes using the Twitter platform. I would hope that Twitter tells the FBI to “come back with a warrant” if they want non-public information.
But the FBI flagging content for removal. Including “disinformation”?
That goes well beyond the remit of the FBI and violates numerous norms of law enforcement influence over public speech.
A good analogy would be a debate club being held in a private bar and the police coming by and saying "yeah, that guy you invited to debate, you think you can "handle" that for us?".
It’s frankly shocking how many people on HN are like “meh…what’s the big deal?”
This is an extension of the whole “Three Felonies a Day” idea: it’s likely any prolific account will violate Twitter Terms of Service at some point, so you can target almost anyone by looking hard enough.
And Twitter is likely to look harder at reports from the FBI than your average user, therefore the FBI has more influence over who they can silence. Maybe they’re abusing it, maybe they’re not, either way it feels improper at best.
Nothing says they can't contact papers.
I can also say no to the feds if they ask me to assassinate someone but it doesn’t mean they aren’t breaking a law by asking me.
Would be a crazy constitutional loophole if the govt simply needs to ask citizens to censor each other (1a), steal their neighbors guns (2a), tell husbands to prevent their wives from voting (19a), etc.
If these censorship request were about bomb threats or something that’s one thing, but they are mostly just spicy political takes. FBI needs to stay in their lane.
In the end the public political discourse needs to move away from corporate run forums. Not sure about Mastodon, but I’m hopeful future iterations of online forums will be more decentralized again.
https://www.fbi.gov/how-we-can-help-you/safety-resources/sca...
> Intentionally deceiving qualified voters to prevent them from voting is voter suppression—and it is a federal crime.
> Bad actors use various methods to spread disinformation about voting, such as social media platforms, texting, or peer-to-peer messaging applications on smartphones. They may provide misleading information about the time, manner, or place of voting. This can include inaccurate election dates or false claims about voting qualifications or methods, such as false information suggesting that one may vote by text, which is not allowed in any jurisdiction.
If that debate club guy was spreading voter misinformation, the FBI would come by and investigate him, too.
In practice, can they? Leave out the part about other governments for a second, just consider the US govt
If you're doing moderation at twitter and Yoel Roth is above you, are you going to tell the FBI to screw off? Especially considering Roth is (apparently, according to Taibbi) meeting regularly with them. From a job security standpoint, how do you think the average white collar employee will behave?
It is protected from the government. Of course, Twitter can decide to censor whatever they want, but if the government was threatening either Twitter or individuals on the platform, over protected speech, eg. criticizing the president, that would certainly implicate the 1A.
The government simply asking, with no implied threat, seems to be OK [1]. But, I don't think it builds confidence amongst the citizens if they were seen doing this very often.
1. https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/19/when-government-urges-p...
But that’s not what’s happening here is it? The FBI is asking Twitter to take down tweets (some of them obvious jokes) without a warrant or evidence of any crime being committed.
That’s what’s happening.
No different than your local cops coming to the bar you like and asking for you to be kicked out.
Would that be ok?
https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/19/when-government-urges-p...
> [A.] Generally speaking, courts have said "yes, that's fine," so long as the government speech doesn't coerce the intermediaries by threatening prosecution, lawsuit, or various forms of retaliation. (Indeed, I understand that government officials not uncommonly ask newspapers, for instance, not to publish certain information that they say would harm national security or interfere with an ongoing criminal investigation.) Here's a sample of appellate cases so holding:
> [B.] On the other hand, where courts find that the government speech implicitly threatened retaliation, rather than simply exhorting or encouraging third parties to block speech, that's unconstitutional.
> [C.] Does it matter whether the government acts systematically, setting up a pipeline for requests to the media? One can imagine courts being influenced by this, as they are in some other areas of the law; but I know of no First Amendment cases so holding.
> [D.] Now in some other areas of constitutional law, this question of government requests to private actors is treated differently, at least by some courts. Say that you rummage through a roommate's papers, find evidence that he's committing a crime, and send it to the police. You haven't violated the Fourth Amendment, because you're a private actor. (Whether you might have committed some tort or crime is a separate question.) And the police haven't violated the Fourth Amendment, because they didn't perform the search. The evidence can be used against the roommate.
> But say that the police ask you to rummage through the roommate's papers. That rummaging may become a search governed by the Fourth Amendment, at least in the eyes of some courts: "the government might violate a defendant's rights by 'instigat[ing]' or 'encourag[ing]' a private party to search a defendant on its behalf."
> Likewise, "In the Fifth Amendment context, courts have held that the government might violate a defendant's rights by coercing or encouraging a private party to extract a confession from a criminal defendant." More broadly, the Supreme Court has said that "a State normally can be held responsible for a private decision only when it has exercised coercive power or has provided such significant encouragement, either overt or covert, that the choice must in law be deemed to be that of the State."
> So maybe there's room for courts to shift to a model where the government's mere encouragement of private speech restrictions is enough to constitute a First Amendment violation on the government's part.
So basically it sounds like this could be the makings of a very fascinating case, if it holds up in court, but there is ample legal precedent of the government doing pretty much what happened on Twitter, already.
> No different than your local cops coming to the bar you like and asking for you to be kicked out. Would that be ok?
I may not like it, and it may not be morally okay, but I am almost certain cops are able to do that, because that is the system we have created.
I'm also curious to know what his guiding principles are but maybe we're stuck reverse engineering them based on his actions. Sticking to an ideal doesn't seem to be his style.
I'm probably missing something. I don't follow him too closely.
"Orwellian" can mean other things when describing state power or surveillance technology, but in this context it is being used to describe language so the connection to Newspeak is the relevant one.
I imagine these agencies do put pressure on private entities on a regular basis, but without actual further proof this is all just ridiculous hand waving.
It comes down to coercion, which can sometimes be hard to prove. In the earlier Twitter Files, a Congressperson mentioned how banning the Hunter Biden Laptop story was going down poorly and the Congressional hearings “would be a blood bath”.
Is that coercion? For the courts to decide I guess.
But I’m in the same camp as you. I have no idea if it’s legal or not, but it makes me very uncomfortable.
And what makes me more uncomfortable is when people read the story and say “so what? It’s a nothingburger”.
If they had published communications between the FBI and Twitter from, say, June 2020, I imagine their audience would not be able to muster quite as much indignation.
Taibbi also brings that up -
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1603890210252668928
> An FBI agent just reached out with a key point about the “gross” subservience of Twitter before the FBI: “A lot of companies we deal with are adversarial to us. Like T-Mobile is totally adversarial. They love leaking things we're saying if we don't get our process right.” (1/2)
> “I feel like that’s the default position. People used to get mad about that in the Bureau, but — they're supposed to represent their clients and their customers. Why in the hell would you expect them to make it easy on you? Do the right thing. Do it the right way.”
Sounds like Twitter just went along with it, without coercion. Which you may choose to criticize as weakness or cowardice, but maybe that's just how they chose to do business.
> I don’t disagree with what you posted at all.
Then you agree that your earlier statement "That goes well beyond the remit of the FBI and violates numerous norms of law enforcement influence over public speech" is wrong and baseless, given the legal context that I have provided.
> And what makes me more uncomfortable is when people read the story and say “so what? It’s a nothingburger”.
For the record, my stance is that it's not a nothingburger, but it is so insignificant so as to provide a convenient distraction for actual malicious acts that are going on, like the Z-Library shutdown. And that all of this is underwhelming, much like this other poster's opinion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34024363
"A whole bunch of mildly unsatisfactory situations" seems to be an adequate summation of this whole situation. Which this thread, like all culture wars, has made a mountain out of.
I have worked at another organization (hosted server provider) where I was in contact with the FBI and other law enforcement.
There's a world of difference between what was shown they did at twitter by noting things that were "worrisome" or against a reasonable site's ToS and forcing anyone to take things down.
I have told agents that certain materials were acceptable and that we would take no action. Not much they could do there without an actual warrant.
Furthermore, the FBI is a police force. They have no business searching Twitter for content to remove unless that particular content is involved directly in the investigation of and filing of criminal charges.
While proposing that Shadowbanning is a tool of the Woke Mind Virus destroying humanity ...
I've seen people here say, "this is normal" and "the FBI is making no threats, so no big deal." That viewpoint is very problematic and has a fundamental lack of understanding about how federal agencies coerce private companies to do their bidding. I've seen other comments "it didn't happen that often, only once a week," it should have never happened at all. Unless there is something that is a threat to an investigation, jury identity, literally against federal law, etc...the FBI has absolutely no business doing this. I'm baffled it has any sort of support.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
How exactly does the FBI asking a private sector company to take down posts violate this amendment?
Edit: Here’s a link with some relevant case law. https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/19/when-government-urges-p...
Disagree with the established precedent if you want, but if you do, I’d recommend picking a different battleground than whatever this Twitter Files fiasco is. This stuff isn’t even on the questionable end of the spectrum.
Do you believe freedom of speech applies to foreign governments?
https://twitter.com/nicoleperlroth/status/160385966043116748...
You’d really suggest that all reports must be treated equally?
How benevolent of the fbi to be making sure twitters users are compliant with twitters TOS! What a nice federal agency, making twitters moderation so much easier!
https://twitter.com/nicoleperlroth/status/160385966043116748...
What Twitter did was not shadowbanning - other people could see the posts.
Pretending it is shadowbanning is bad faith arguing of the worst kind.
No I don’t agree. “Norms” are separate from the legal context you gave.
If no coercion took place, that doesn’t make what the FBI did “ok” even if no laws were broken.
Like my earlier analogy, if my local cops started asking businesses to kick people out (and the businesses agreed) that’s a major problem, even if not illegal.
Law enforcement’s job is to identify crimes and arrest people.
When their scope starts expanding into working with willing private companies to silence individuals who have committed no crime, that should worry everyone, whether it happens with Twitter or your local bar.
It’s amazing to see a normally anti-law enforcement HN suddenly rally to the FBI’s defense.
"They could sue if they don't want to do it" does not make the request legal.
https://twitter.com/aclu/status/1587198479608303622
What's shocking is that people's perceptions of what's legal have changed so dramatically in just a few years. I can't imagine anyone making these arguments in 2005. It seems some powerful interests have been able to successfully co-opt SV companies and change the entire public conversation about what the First Amendment means. I would like to know a lot more about what's going on here. I don't think the same tired arguments about "disinformation" and "social harmony" that have been trotted out for centuries against free speech have suddenly gained all this credence by accident.
It would be 'cherry picking' if the result was something out of context and therefore misrepresented.
There's a legit story here, probably not to the extent made out to be but it's newsworthy.
What could be 'cherry picking' in the grand context, is that SpaceX has 'deep ties' with state apparatus, even the military, and we just don't talk about that. So by highlighting 'this thing over here' and not 'that thing over there' we lose context that Musk is in bed with the Pentagon while lambasting something happening with the FBI. And I'm not suggesting working with either is wrong, but that it's a bit hypocritical.
In our system, law including the Constitution is interpreted by the judiciary. You could as well ask "where is the Miranda warning in the Bill of Rights?"
The actual precedents around "jawboning" are murky and contradictory, but it's well-established that the government can step over the line in violating constitutionally protected rights via informal coercion.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/informal-government-coercion-and...
It seems to me rather that all these folks shocked to hear this stuff just haven’t been paying attention to either their high school civics course or to current events of the last 20 years.
You actually think the FBI doesn’t report content? Obviously they do.
You don’t think the FBI gets a privileged reporting line over newuser1848391? Obviously they do.
You don’t think Twitter regularly gets content moderation requests, from governments or elsewhere, that they simply decline? Obviously they do.
And you don’t think they sometimes get content moderation requests from governments or elsewhere that they oblige? Obviously they do.
Here’s a good overview of relevant case law: https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/19/when-government-urges-p...
Will you also be surprised to hear that almost all private companies can (and many will) simply choose to hand over your private data to the government upon warrantless request?
Nor is it news to me that companies are increasingly voluntarily sharing vast amounts of data with the government, to the point that the surveillance state we feared has come to pass as a corporate-state partnership.
What I’m surprised about is the increasing number of people who see it as normal and acceptable, or choose to dismiss it as “oh, this has been happening.” Yeah, that doesn’t make it okay.
So long as there’s no coercion it’s completely legal. Not considered a controversial topic.
https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/19/when-government-urges-p...
There are lots of dangers with this pattern but this is simply an extremely extremely poor case to try to take up the fight on.
I'd prefer to see the FBI acting in a passive role, here, rather than a proactive one. Meaning, they act more in response to people reporting social media behavior, instead of creating their own missions, so to speak.
One of the problems with this sort of governmental creep, is once it happens it's nearly impossible to take it back - look at the Patriot act/Homeland security, for example, or the god-awful and useless TSA. It's very easy to imagine this social media task force growing into another branch, and, as with all of these agencies, the Big Brother potential is a scary one.
There’s some selection bias here — the tweets we see in the thread are the ones twitter didn’t remove and the accounts twitter didn’t ban.
Twitter surely has the deleted tweets around somewhere, but it doesn’t seem to have been provided to the twitter files reporters.
Your whole argument is just "sure this is reasonable now but what if there were 8000 agents online and they could extraordinary rendition you". 80 agents for the whole country is not absurd. That's less than 2 per state.
I'm inclined to think that anything that went from the FBI to Twitter went through Twitter's Legal Department, and at least one person signed off—which, given the rebuffs of more public attempts, seems like anything signed off on was done in good faith. So in my mind the problem isn't Twitter, it's the FBI. To me it's the framing (which was always going to be problematic, it's Matt Taibbi).
And to be clear, I think one isn't paying attention if they try to lay blame at the feet of any one administration for this, this is a long-standing issue originating inside the FBI.
Of course they do, if that speech would likely incite or produce imminent lawless action. IDK if what they were flagging all meets that standard (some of the examples in the thread seem like a stretch to me, but then again they're obviously supposed to), but I think if we're gonna discuss 1A we should actually understand it.
People with poor information diets hear the FBI is involved with Twitter and immediately think it has something to do with red team blue team politics. These are the people the Twitter Files content is produced for. It's written vaguely enough to give potato chip peddlers creative license, so they can monetize attention.
Why would we be wasting government resources alerting private companies of their terms of service anyway?
Also don’t think it’s a waste to try to prevent ISIS recruiting material from reaching more confused and angry young men.
Both are legal though!
Except that's not how most people understand the term. Terminology is defined by its usage, so if you're in the minority of how this term is used, you've lost. We already had this debate about hacker/cracker over 20 years ago. Hacker is still here, so get used to the broader meaning of shadowbanning.
Weekly meetings between the FBI and top Twitter executives is "akin to clicking the report button"? Name one other Twitter user that had this privilege. I think that's a pretty strong sign that you're trying to stretch this analogy too far.
Notably, none of the content the FBI was monitoring in this thread had anything to do with terrorism, but that fear is still guiding many people's responses.
Imagine if the FBI came to your house and asked you to take down a sign in your front yard.
Internal jargon can be Orwellian. These are not mutually exclusive.
> But it's presented as a "deep state"-like collusion where the agencies control if twitter act on them or not.
No, this chummy relationship is presented as problematic. Nowhere does he imply that the FBI controls what Twitter does. It's not a priori wrong to think that the government should not have such a close involvement with Twitter in its act of moderating/censoring. Having a lower threshold than you for risk of malfeasance is not a priori wrong. If you think your risk assessment is better, now you can make that argument using actual data, and those who disagree can make theirs. Fostering public debate is exactly what good journalism is supposed to do.
> But they are presented mostly stripped of context and the focus is on anonymized employees snarky comments to make it seem like decisions were arbitrary, partisan, and without any regard to logic or context.
Sounds like standard journalism to me. Maybe your beef is not with Taibbi and the "Twitter files" but with how journalism as a whole is conducted. I agree, but don't apply a higher bar here where it's inconvenient.
The 14th amendment significantly expanded the reach of constitutional protections, primarily to require all government to comply.
2:
Did Congress pass a law authorizing the FBI to snoop on social media and use private companies to censor speach? No? Then by what authority was the FBI doing this?
The root of the FBIs authority is in law passed by Congress.
This set of tweets details 150 emails total over a period of over two and a half years (jan 2020 to nov 2022).
It even specifically quotes their mention of their quarterly meeting.
My biggest problem with people who think the Twitter files are A Big Deal, is their seeming inability to accurately describe the contents.
Per [1]:
"Orwellian" is an adjective describing a situation, idea, or societal condition that George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free and open society. It denotes an attitude and a brutal policy of draconian control by propaganda, surveillance, disinformation, denial of truth (doublethink), and manipulation of the past [...]
Indeed, just as you seem to ignore Twitter’s power. They are protected from the FBI by the Constitution and the courts, and they have the money (read: power) to actually enforce those protections had they felt threatened or coerced by the government. The FBI may have power but they are not all powerful, not even close.
Or maybe you're just ignorant of the contents:
https://news.yahoo.com/twitter-executive-met-fbi-weekly-0150...
So it was not limited to foreign government operations (or to QAnon, since it is phrased as a mere example).
They have a limited budget. If the FBI reckons their mission is best accomplished this way, who are we to second-guess it?
I don’t see any sign they resisted or even wanted to resist. That’s not a first amendment issue.
You can make an argument that the FBI should not be doing that, but no laws were broken. Also most of this was under the Trump administration.
Lastly.. Twitter is a private walled garden. It is not a free speech zone. It wasn’t before Musk bought it and it isn’t now and it never will be.
He used to aim “left” with it but seems to have drifted in the same fashy direction as Greenwald and other populists as well as a lot of former “Chomskyan” leftists.
Let met assure you that in St. Petersburg they are working hard and those in Moscow don't complain about the price of steering elections. I invite you to look up the cost of a MiG vs some click farms, alt right bots and blogs.
When I say weapons, you think about rockets. The advantage of the Kremlin is they can use weapons you don't recognize as such. You are even pleading to give them free reign to overthrow democracy.
The fact that the government has to plead with an american corporate to not let other nations fuck things up even more than where you are collectively now, might give you a second thought.
FWIW, to appease the cowardly-downvote brigade, I personally believe the concept of a penumbra is valid and important. But the world doesn't always bend to my will. Merely invoking the concept without considering current context is weak because it won't convince anyone of anything. If you want to make an argument based on that, you'll have to put in a bit more effort than just pasting a link.
https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+shadowban&oq=defin...
verb: shadowban - block (a user) from a social media site or online forum without their knowledge, typically by making their posts and comments no longer visible to other users.
People are ghost banned for poor language and insults. You have to imagine that Twitter is generally not very permissive based on how they treat average users. Many of the #NAFO folks are shadow banned.
This whole spectacle seems like a giant straw man in the making. The people that ran Twitter set it up based on their own belief of what is acceptable and there is nothing wrong with that.
There is no real oversight at an investigation or agent level since the FBI does not police itself. Few other agencies have the ability to review the FBI and the DOJ often fails to do this as well, they are all part of the same family.
Congress has oversight but that is more of an institutional oversight and not down to the agents themselves.
And it's basically a fact that all law enforcement is slow or almost never holds itself accountable for anything. This is even more true with a quasi international intelligence agency that the FBI has become.
The FBI has always had a unique role in the U.S., and it is disturbing to see corruption hiding behind the political division.
The left historically had many problems with the FBI. The history there is clear. The FBI had historically been a conservative type of institution and was often well regarded by the right. This seems to have flipped lately and I wish people could put all of that to the side and take a rational view of information released even in the Twitter files and things like the MLK Tapes podcast.
It can be, and you're zeroing on sense where vague lingo like "enhanced interrogation" replaces plain "torture".
But that's a stretch. Every profession develops their own lingo over time. They're called "term of art" (1)
An example is when one sysadmin asks another to "bounce the box" - these words have specific meanings which are opaque to outsiders, but are brief and precise to insiders.
This "internal lingo" developing is normal, inevitable, even necessary, and not in any way a "red flag".
If the admins of twitter had several different terms instead of calling them all the same thing then ... maybe they just needed to be brief and precise, to distinguish between them, in order to do the job effectively? You're trying to invent a problem where there is none.
1 )
https://www.yourdictionary.com/term-of-art
The government routinely speaks to news papers about the government opinion on articles and how they are wrong. That's not censorship. Holding a figurative pistol to someones head and say "change this line" is censoring and supressing free speech.
If you think that men in black suits who can put you in jail for simply lying to them or obstructing them then you are vey naive.
And that's not even considering all the trouble the DOJ can put organisations through even though they committed no crime.
Just their reputation and power is enough to apply pressure.
Its comical that people believe Musk is promoting free speech or anything of the sort. Most of everything he does online is antics to draw attention in some way that benefits him, go look at the SEC for details around that with Musk.
I would make a bet one of his next options is to saddle Twitter with more debt as it approaches bankruptcy. Or give insider info to his investors ahead of his next Tesla sell-off so they can recoup their losses with Twitter.
Do we know this for a fact? The only way to find this out is to test it in courts. There could be executive orders involved, the Patriot Act or related acts, or simply a "state of emergency" or two declarations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i...
Open:
"Now, Therefore, I, George W. Bush, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, I hereby declare that the national emergency has existed since September 11, 2001, and, pursuant to the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.), I intend to utilize the following statutes: sections 123, 123a, 527, 2201(c), 12006, and 12302 of title 10, United States Code, and sections 331, 359, and 367 of title 14, United States Code."
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/WCPD-2001-09-17/pdf/WCPD...
"Disloyal to the team" is not fascism.
Also, please read the guidelines about low-effort comments.
If feels like you're accusing journalists of lying to push an agenda, which is, by definition, not journalism. Journalism is about informing. Not saying everyone does it perfectly, in the same way you can do bad science that is still technically science.
And you're saying it's conservative to be opposed to that?
I understand it lined up with the liberal side regarding the election but that doesn't make Taibbi (or myself) a conservative for opposing it. Distrusting the FBI ought to be a liberal value.
If the police ask you to do something, do you usually feel generally obligated to comply?
What about an even more powerful organization that can and do prosecute people for simply lying or obstructing?
The way Twitter defines shadowban is more narrow than that.
This is seriously some hitleresque reichstag fire stuff. The FBi manufactures a fake domestic terrorism crisis and uses it to justify their further expansion of power.
Even if we agree that that's what journalism should be, what is your assessment of how accurately this definition matches most high profile journalism today? How much context did the Covington kids get, or how much context did the rail workers who wanted to strike get? There are very clearly some contexts that get priority coverage and are hammered non-stop, and some contexts that barely get any coverage at all.
To be clear, I'm not sure that I do agree with your definition. I think journalists typically do what you describe, but I think merely reporting raw data without context is also perfectly valid journalism. This "contextualisation" narrative is how some journalists are excusing their lack of support for Assange, and it's bullshit IMO.
> If feels like you're accusing journalists of lying to push an agenda, which is, by definition, not journalism
Unbiased journalism is a fiction. I agree that the best journalists try for objectivity, but this is an ethos that is slowly being pushed out of mainstream journalism, and activism has become standard practice (edit: this is probably because outrage generates more clicks/views, so activism "sells" in a sense).
I also think some professional journalists absolutely do outright lie for utilitarian reasons, such as "fighting evil" (typically Republicans). This goes back to the activism point.
Far more common are various forms of well known bias, my side bias, bias blind spot etc. This leads to one convincing oneself of a falsehood and then vehemently arguing for it, despite countervailing evidence.
Uh, no? I'm pretty sure every American schoolchild is educated on his or her rights under the Constitution. It's not unusual at all for police to pull people over for minor infractions and assert they have the ability to search their cars, and for people who know their rights to decline said search, and for everyone to go on their merry way. If the cop chooses to force a search anyway, it's not unusual at all for them to get sued and for all evidence collected to be deemed inadmissible. This is all, again, extremely well established.
Twitter surely has an army of extremely capable and well-paid lawyers who know very well which requests they have a right to decline. They've got to be more legally equipped than your average 9th grader.
This is why it's important for people to have an accurate understanding of their rights and their relationship with their government. The position you're taking weakens people's understanding of their rights.
So let it be known for any future operators of social media networks: the US government cannot coerce you – even implicitly – to remove legal content from your website. If they do, decline and let them bring you to court, hit up the ACLU to represent you, and sue the fucking daylights out of the US Government. It's your right and your duty!
They literally wrote a blog post about it 4 years ago[1]. This wasn't hidden. Anyone who is "shocked" by Twitter's definition of shadow banning (which, in my opinion aligns with what I posted anyways) is doing performative outrage of an insincere nature.
[1] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/Setting-t...
NYT has published data about the growth of CSAM due to tech companies. [2]
Would you engage with the point of my comment if I called the domestic terrorism non-linear growth, and the CSAM growth exponential?
edit: politeness
[1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/evolution-domestic-terrorism
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...
Language is about effective communication. Right now we're all trying to have an important conversation about relevant social issues which requires a common understanding. You cited the common understanding, I pointed out how Twitter engaged in practices covered by that common understanding, and that should be the end of that. Can we move on now?
Instead of bikeshedding over this irrelevant minutae, engage with the actual substance of the discussions, like whether they should shadowban in the way they've been doing it, whether there should be limits to moderation policies for online public squares, what the guidelines for censoring speech should look like, whether to deplatform people entirely or merely deprioritize their speech, etc.
The citizens of a democracy who have full political rights and whose government is not allowed to do anything at all without our approval.
Really? I thought you were restricted to voting for your representatives?
Russian disinformation operations are exactly as effective and competent as the rest of the Russian government, which can't even win a war against Ukraine. Its not remotely scary.
This comment also totally ignores the fact that the “Twitter files” have also contributed to the realization that these companies are riddled with ex-FBI and other government employees who were partly responsible for responding to these requests, let alone the idea of corporate employees toadying up to the government security state is incompatible with democracy whether or not someone could hypothetically sue.
Also, it’s great to hear my duty is to sue the government if it does wrong. That’s true. That also works out very badly for people all the time and entails spending a lot of money and years of your life on an uncertain outcome.
These stories are additional proof the FBI needs huge reforms and mass layoffs. It’s still the agency of J Edgar Hoover, who to this day was in charge for nearly half its existence. But the culture of these tech companies is also extremely concerning.
And even moreso, as I said in my original comment (and which you misunderstood even in your response), the shocking part is that people think this is fine, and nobody is asking who and what has caused such a massive shift in American beliefs.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/27/trump-t...
To the extent that "informal coercion" could be problematic. This is pretty standard practice for most politicians of course and I think we all know where all those "Free Speech" proponents that are worried that Twitter was "informally coerced by FBI's emails" stood on this, when Trump was constantly threatening Twitter.
The problem is that people are getting at the FBI for the wrong things. They should be getting mad at the shutting down of Z-Library instead, which holds far more impact for far more people than the two dozen accounts discussed in the OP (who weren’t even all suspended). When people are concerned about petty crimes, the big ones get unnoticed.
They don't prevent people seeing tweets of anyone. If you follow soneone you see their tweets, if you dont follow them but gonto their profile you see their tweets.
Tweets are universally publically viewable. The policies they use are not secret.
Trying to start a conversation about their secret shadowbanning policy is a dead end as the policy is not shadow banning and it is not secret.
What evidence do you have of “a massive shift?” Because on my side there’s 200 years of case law that all pretty much concurs on every single instance of this happening.
Yes I do think it’s fine that our security apparatus attempts to maintain security within the confines of legislated and adjudicated law and that private corporations are able - both in theory and in practice - to resist unlawful pressure to control information. “Checks and balances” is a state of tension. Party X requests, Party Y denies, Party Z adjudicates. That’s how it works.
This is factually not true at all: https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/13/politics/poll-constitution/in... https://thenewamerican.com/poll-most-americans-dont-know-bil...
People talk to the police and incriminate themselves all the time. This has been a front-line of civil rights activists for decades now. What are you even talking about?
> It's not unusual at all for police to pull people over for minor infractions and assert they have the ability to search their cars, and for people who know their rights to decline said search, and for everyone to go on their merry way. If the cop chooses to force a search anyway, it's not unusual at all for them to get sued and for all evidence collected to be deemed inadmissible. This is all, again, extremely well established.
"Not unusual" is a very subjective term and doesn't mean anything at all. And it is now confirmed that Twitter had daily meetings and contacts with the FBI/DHS, which means they did talk to federal law enforcement. There is no reason to make this statement is absurd knowing that they did talk...
> Twitter surely has an army of extremely capable and well-paid lawyers who know very well which requests they have a right to decline. They've got to be more legally equipped than your average 9th grader.
See the links above. Also Twitter is not a person and this does not apply to most employees and moderators. And the execs who knew what they were doing and wouldn't have done it if it weren't in their interest of those of the company. That's where the de facto coercion comes in. The DOJ coming for the Twitter "asking" or "indicating" that they do not approve some content is an undue pressure in and of itself.
>This is why it's important for people to have an accurate understanding of their rights and their relationship with their government. The position you're taking weakens people's understanding of their rights. So let it be known for any future operators of social media networks: the US government cannot coerce you – even implicitly – to remove legal content from your website. If they do, decline and let them bring you to court, hit up the ACLU to represent you, and sue the fucking daylights out of the US Government. It's your right and your duty!
Okay Mr. Goodman, at this point you're just grandstanding.
https://www.start.umd.edu/publication/qanon-offenders-united...
This is why it's bad for society to let individuals be richer than nation states. This is why aristocracy was bad. Too bad the notion of freedom was used to rebuild aristocracy.
Yes, they did talk of their own volition. As they are free (under their 1st Amendment rights) to do. We have no reason to suspect that they’ve been coerced except for the fact that you disagree with the choice they made! They on the other hand were surely aware of their rights when they chose to talk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93Apple_encryption_d...
Since then, Apple has stepped up their end to end encryption stance, which seems like the opposite of what you’re implying.
That is shadowbanning by your own definition, and each ban was not disclosed and thus done in secret, because that's what it means to be shadowbanned.
There is a perfectly obvious interpretation of the language being used to describe this situation, and all you're doing is adding noise because people aren't using terms in the way you want while ignoring the substance. That's textbook bad faith arguing, which ironically is what you were accusing the original poster of doing.
> Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive.
[0] https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...
And yes, this definitional/access tension always exists when taking political stances that go against the entrenched power structure. Try to get an antiwar opinion broadcast in 2003 - music DJ's weren't even allowed to play songs whose lyrics might hint that war in general might be a bad thing. Dealing with this is just a completely new experience for those on the right that have gone from being conservative (ie generally supportive of the incumbent power structure and institutions) to revolutionary/reactionary and directly against the status quo power structure.
Social mass media, like all mass media, is now controlled by big capital (as was inevitable), with varying degrees of the individual employees adding some grassroots slant. Focusing on the slight individual flavor and ignoring the overriding power dynamic is just falling into the same old disempowering partisan trap.
This is only confusing starting from your own incorrect premise.
Or put another way: the government cannot coerce Twitter or any other platform to carry someone else’s speech.
Note however the government is free to ask Twitter to carry people’s speech, as Trump did almost daily for 4+ years whining about so and so getting banned or de-boosted etc.
Here’s the blind spot I think a lot of people have, including perhaps Taibbi.
It’s fine to hate things about the current system. It’s fine to be critical of the FBI or any other part of that system. But if you want to have a revolution, the first thing you have to get right is suggesting an alternative that is better than that system, not one that is profoundly worse.
A totalitarian state run by a con man is profoundly worse than the current system. I will back the current system any day over the alternatives put forward to date.
For the record I don’t think the radical left has any better ideas either.
There’s a whole crop of people who lived thorough Iraq and the 2008 bailouts who have lost sight of that. Taibbi is probably included here. Greenwald too. They’ve forgotten that most revolutions result in something worse than what was overthrown because everyone is paying more attention to who they are against than to who they are fighting for.
> Or put another way: the government cannot coerce Twitter or any other platform to carry someone else’s speech.
You're making a straw man that's not what I said...
The government can't ask or suggest or apply undue pressure to Twitter to ban content. Social media has been sued for this successfully to get people unbanned.
The Twitter files are not even about Twitter being coerced to put things on their site. What are you even talking about?
At least that’s how it works under US law. I get the impression you’re not so familiar with American law though?
Yes they can ask and suggest removal. They cannot coerce but we have no reason to believe they did. I already linked to a long list of case law establishing this. Have a good rest of your weekend!
Honestly it’s not very fruitful arguing this stuff with someone who clearly doesn’t understand the basics of the American system. There are plenty of resources online to learn about all this stuff if you’re interested.
But it doesn't outrage you because you're in agreement with the shit they're shoveling.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/15/tech-groups-supreme...
Instead it feels like vapid virtue signaling, especially as Musk is doing far more to fight CSAM than the previous owners. Also, all the FBI censorship in the Twitter files dump had nothing to do with CSAM.
Anyways, no, your CSIS link doesn't even support the notion of super linear growth. And, if the FBI is inflating domestic terrorism numbers, what other agencies are doing the same?
https://www.dailywire.com/news/report-fbi-agents-pushed-to-f...
"The FBI leadership’s “demand for [w]hite supremacy … vastly outstrips the supply of [w]hite supremacy,” one agent told the Times. “We have more people assigned to investigate [w]hite supremacists than we can actually find.”
The FBI brass has directed the bureau’s investigative efforts primarily toward domestic extremism cases, especially those with racial components, the agent said. The agent suggested that the push is so forceful that otherwise legal activities are sometimes swept up in the FBI’s scrutiny of certain actions for a potential extremist link.
“We are sort of the lapdogs as the actual agents doing these sorts of investigations, trying to find a crime to fit otherwise First Amendment-protected activities,” he said. “If they have a Gadsden flag and they own guns and they are mean at school board meetings, that’s probably a domestic terrorist.”"
These reports really should disturb you and other readers, that law enforcement agents are being incentivized to act deceitfully on behalf of Partisan politics and as an excuse to broaden their power and influence.
In this case, Twitter packages up two objectively observable things, people you follow and people who are popular, along with Twitter's own opinion about who the bad-faith actors are. It's that last subjective part that is at issue here. Yet all three are lumped together under the term "rank" [1], and we are told it is the bad actors who are manipulating, not Twitter.
I'm not calling for the demise of Twitter's former leadership, just calling out corporate speak where I see it. YouTube is at least transparent in this respect. They openly say that they "reduce" content [2].
[1] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/Setting-t...
[2] https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/the-four-rs-of-responsib...
I think what the comment above is saying is that it's not about whether or not speech on Twitter is protected. It's that the government isn't supposed to act to restrict speech in any manner that doesn't cross the lines he listed.
If I'm remembering correctly, there was a big court case because Trump was hiding critical responses to his tweets on Twitter. The judge ruled that Trump violated the 1st amendment even though Twitter is a private company ("private property"?).
This is because the 1st amendment not only protects speech, it restricts government attempts to control speech (or at least that's the argument that would be made).
Though having the FBI and Twitter policy people being in such close communication must be eyebrow raising at least. And it a little bizarre honestly.
I have no idea why people like yourself try to twist the argument. Also, there is a thing like "principles" which aren't encoded into law but are encoded into society and makes it work quite well, which includes free speech. So, I can believe a platform should have the maximum amount of free speech possible...and that is not the same as saying it has or needs 1st Amendment protections.
For the amount of backlash HN gives to private companies for harvesting private data and handing it over to government...there are SUPRISING amounts of people here defending the government in coercing on this. Baffling.
Why would your theory about this be at all relevant when we have direct evidence (original emails, etc.) that the opposite is true, that there was no intermediation or oversight by Twitter legal in takedown requests?
This continues to be incorrect: their posts are visible to anyone on the internet and show up to their followers. The only thing twitter is not doing is having their algorithm highlight them to people who weren’t following them or participating in a conversation with them. That doesn’t fit any common definition of shadow-banning.
Twitter’s internal tools still have all of that data. In most cases the Internet Archive also does, too, which is how people have confirmed that, for example, the tweets in the famous “handled” email were nudes in violation of the non-consensual policy with no overriding news value.
No, I don't know how many times I have to repeat this: if you use Twitter's search to try to find a delisted user on Twitter, you can't find them. Sometimes you can't even @ them. This fits the general definition of shadowbanning that the other poster provided, wherein their content cannot be found using Twitter, thereby that qualifies as being shadowbanned on Twitter.
The fact that you can sometimes find that content via other means is totally irrelevant.
Your frustration stems from angrily telling people something is wrong based on your misunderstanding of a term. You’re welcome not to like the practice or lobby against it but you’re just signing up for frustration trying to get everyone to switch to your redefinition.
If you want to see a "fascist coup" plan, go look at Golden Dawn being busted with blueprints to parliament that indicated they were going to break down the walls with tanks.
What you're effectively saying here is that people should not be concerned about massive FBI overreach and should discard what he has covered elsewhere because 'orange man bad', when Trump barely factors into anything here. That's deranged, and it's not going to be taken seriously outside of your bubble.
The Twitter Files already has a statement from a Congressperson that Twitter's actions with the Hunter laptop will "result in a blood bath" during Congressional hearings.
If the 800 lb gorilla that is the US government is threatening a "blood bath", do you really have a choice when they ask for your "cooperation"?
Sure, innocuous sounding words like "rendition" would never be reappropriated as code for something more sinister, right?
Seems to me that innocuous sounding jargon actually makes Orwellian doublethink much easier to swallow. Like a frog in a slowly heated pot of water, you get exposed to and acclimatize to progressively more problematic uses of power until you simultaneously believe that you are a patriot upholding citizen's rights while routinely violating them.
I'm not really sure why you think this process can't happen in a private company.
I'm quite suspicious of the large amount of anti Elon propaganda going around. Especially on this platform where comments are usually more measured. It just looks different to normal and it has my Spidey senses tingling.
And if FBI provides such requests often enough, it makes sense to ingest them in the most efficient way that works for both sides.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/29/politics/washington-pipe-bomb...
It failed because the bombs were found and because Mike Pence defected or at least chickened out at the last minute.
That’s why they were chanting “hang Mike Pence” not “hang Nancy Pelosi.” What you saw was a rage filled riot in the wake of a failing coup attempt.
Had the bombs gone off and Pence stopped the count a state of emergency would have been declared. I’m not totally convinced of this part but I’ve read that they were expecting a bunch of radical left counter protestors and that the role of the mob was supposed to be to start a big street brawl with Antifa or whoever was supposed to show to help feed into the state of emergency ploy to suspend the election.
It was more elaborately planned than Hitler’s beer hall putsch which was a bunch of Nasis getting blasted at the bar and having a street brawl with police that ended in a very asymmetrical gun fight.
Luckily it probably will end here this time though since Trump is too old, Flynn and Bannon are too obviously kooky, and DeSantis doesn’t have it in him. He knows how to troll the woke for attention but I don’t get hard core fascist vibes from him. He will try to do a Viktor Orban but it won’t work here because America has courts and federalism, and he doesn’t have the balls to attempt a coup. Say what you will about Trump but he did have balls.
It's not my redefinition, it's literally the definition the other poster provided which they discovered via Google, and the application of that definition matches how thousands of tech and laypeople are using it in this conversation, and how the media is covering it. But, you do you.
Finally, I'm not sure where your ability to surmise my emotional state based only on text comes from, but I think it needs some tuning.
I am a former Tesla fan and remain a SpaceX fan. I hold Tesla stock and I would buy SpaceX stock in a hot minute if I could. And I credit Musk in no small part with making both companies what they are today, the good and the bad, although not nearly as much as Musk credits Musk.
And yet with all of that, I still think he's gone off the deep end. I've voted against him as CEO in the past several shareholders' votes. Defending his recent actions and attitudes at this point is an increasingly untenable position.
If you want to stand in his corner, I suppose that's your choice, but being critical of him is the far more defensible position. Claiming that those who do are all sock puppets is frankly disingenuous.
Yes, yes they do.
"That viewpoint is very problematic and has a fundamental lack of understanding about how federal agencies coerce private companies to do their bidding."
What evidence of coercion is there?
Yeah there’s plenty to critique of FBI, but this is a profoundly weak case.
If you spend time doing raw info dumps from one side of an argument, say the unions in the rail strike, you're not telling the whole story.
Telling the whole story is important to journalism. It's why you always see "X did not respond to a request for comment." They attempt to give the other side to speak.
Telling only one side of the story makes you a mouthpiece, not a journalist.
I didn't say journalism is without bias, but that's a completely separate topic. Let's try to keep this from turning into a "here's all of the things wrong with journalism and no solutions" rant thread.
You can be biased and also not attempt to push an agenda. The inverse is true, too.
I disagree. I think journalism is simply "presenting a factual story". I think presenting a contextual story is better journalism, but it's not necessary to qualify as journalism.
https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/16048884298162094...
In fact, most of the comments in support of Twitter and the FBI throughout these threads are pretty decisively debunked in the continued reports.
